Ingrid Daubechies

Ingrid Daubechies is a Belgian-American physicist and mathematician at Duke University, born in 1954 in Houthalen, Belgium, and best known for her work with wavelets in image compression. She obtained her PhD in theoretical physics in 1980 at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, on work that grew out of her collaboration with Alex Grossmann in Marseille. Her name is attached to the orthogonal Daubechies wavelet and the biorthogonal CDF wavelet, and a wavelet from this family is used in the JPEG 2000 standard. She has also applied image processing to help establish the authenticity and age of famous paintings, including works by Vincent van Gogh and Rembrandt, and she was the first woman to serve as president of the International Mathematical Union, from 2011 to 2014. She is a 1992 MacArthur Fellow and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.